i'm going home and i'm coming to you
by ten.years.only.with.you
Summary: his french is rusty at best, but lydia has always been able to find words that were never said. AU isaac comes back for s4 ensemble.


_**super AU where isaac comes home with chris. sorry in advance. also my French isn't the greatest.**_

x

_i'm going home and i'm coming to you, chasing the beat of my heart._

x

the chateau smells like lilacs and tangerines and the walls are climbing concrete with vines of jasmine snaking around the windows and he swears to Christ he can hear her laughter in the hallways.

he definitely hears chris sobbing in his room as quietly as he can and some part of isaac breaks and shatters because there was only one person that could put him back together and she is dregs of earl grey tea and crimson nail polish and cozy sweaters. the kind of home that makes a person ache all over without her.

he calls her voicemail again just to hear the lilt of her letters curling around her tongue, how she sounds sends him reeling into a bottle of whiskey in the local village and making eye contact with all the girls with chocolate whorls of hair until chris comes into the bar and beats the hell out of him in the street, yelling at him like a son all the while. isaac's French is rusty, but some of it he makes out—

_il est plus facile de mourir que de vivre_

without her it doesn't feel that way.

x

he trails along in shoppes day after day. he makes bouquets of scarlet peonies woven with scalding emerald slashes of eucalyptus and ivory roses that prick his fingers drawing coppery red. the wind rustles his hair, combing its way through bronze curls. he sighs into the blooms and pays the man behind the counter who smiles at him with a sick sad swoop on his mouth. everyone in this blessed hamlet knows who he is, why he is here, what he is doing in the wake of a death that swallowed the sun.

that afternoon he puts an entire clip into the side of a tree and cries silently, letting his body collapse, exhausted and weary. he spends the last bit of time on his cell phone calling Lydia.

they sit in silence for a half hour until he hears someone knock at what he knows is her bedroom door.

_it's scott. should I tell him you're okay?_ she will ask like she does time and time over.

_no, no. he has enough weight to burden_. he will say, voice straining on the syllables.

she will swallow audibly in the receiver and whisper along the streams of the Atlantic that stretches between them. _come home, isaac._

x

chris books the flights to California the next day. isaac counts the days that they have been in france. it's a little less than two months.

he has amassed a collection on an unmarked grave of fresh flowers each day, a drinking problem by night, and finally gives in with a sigh, Chinese ring dagger breaking the skin of his palm. he sends Lydia a dozen blood orange tulips kissed with a rose sunburst overnight.

she texts him a single word:

_maison._

x

he lands on a Wednesday evening with the California sun setting on his back and chris' hand on his shoulder as they are greeted by an empty airport. the arrival gate is stale, fluorescent lights and blinking red signs, jet lag hard on his sea glass eyes, but his vision is crystal clear when they enter the stifling western dry heat and Lydia's parked out front.

her eyes are red rimmed and her hair is a hot mess of strawberry blonde waves, she's got on allison's teal sweater with the black hearts all over it, and out the corner of his eye, he sees chris start to crumble as he hugs this seventeen year old girl in his arms.

who said that Juliet was supposed to die at seventeen, eternally young and beautiful, the entire world balanced in her hands?

x

he sleeps on the couch in the argent loft because her room is too much for him to even consider entering, yet alone sleeping in. the entire damn apartment smells like tangerines and it almost sends him right to the liquor cabinet.

chris makes them earl grey tea that neither of them drinks. Lydia left hours before with worry etched on her cheekbones and dark circles under the jade eyes. she isn't going to tell anyone until it's necessary. isaac thanks the ghost of a dead girl for her best friend and wishes he could feel thorns draw coppery red from his fingers. if nothing else but to fucking feel something.

x

he accidentally runs into stiles during what he knows is supposed to be fifth period.

chris sent him out for milk and coffee and loaves of French bread and some arugula. he's inspecting the arugula like he's got nothing to do all damn afternoon—which let's be fair, he doesn't—and stilinski looks like he's about ready to lose it. he's doing that thing with his mouth where it makes all those motions and no words come out until he finally has enough and

_fuck stiles stop what do you want._

he knows he hasn't slept in two months and he's got a hole in his jeans at the knee and he's pretty sure he's precariously balancing the milk on the coffee canister and it's a little shaky, and stiles just stops moving his mouth and all his limbs and narrows his eyes

_does scott even know you're back._

it's like a bullet to the heart.

x

after quick introductions in the loft cause stiles can't keep his damn mouth shut to save his life

(_you know kira and oh yeah braeden I guess her and Derek are kinda thing now but she saved your life a long time ago and this is malia and she's the werecoyote –_

Lydia grimaces after that last one, fingers wrung tightly around his own)

he gets the lowdown of what has been happening like kate and peter and berzerkers and the little runt that thinks he's scott's beta bestie when _lets be real here_ and lost powers and deadpool. it's way too much all at once for the boy that's been wandering around French villages in the middle of November, cool air cutting into his cheeks and pinking his lips so he walks out of the loft and into the mild California winter. he hears them inside talking, turns up the volume on instinct alone.

_the fact that he chased a girl that ripped him to shreds says a lot about him_, malia says, and he hears the sharp smack of palm on skin and he can feel Derek sprint up the staircase and scott slam the front door and a moment later Lydia joins him breathing between her teeth, hand red and angry.

isaac smiles for what feels like the first time in months, and it hurts like hell but he's missed that. _he's always gonna love you. you know that right? _he says as Lydia chokes out a laugh and leans on his shoulder.

everything is a mess and they are disjointed and missing a limb but they carry on.

x

some nights he sleeps on the couch in the loft and Derek never says anything at all.

some nights he crawls in lydia's second story window off the trellis, a trick he learned climbing in allison's window, and they drink whiskey in silence and hold hands like the wound is never going to heal.

he stays at scott's once and only once because he can't look at Melissa and watch her eyes fill with hurt about the fact that he left and never said goodbye and he wonders if she will ever forgive him but he knows she does because the love a mother has for a child is unparalleled. he can't take the fact that he disappointed her so much even though he knows she just wants him back in his old room and him and scott making her breakfast on their way out the door to school and her coming home from the hospital.

other nights he stays on the couch in the argent apartment, but being there is like falling in love with her all over again. chris is never there and the door to allison's room remains locked. it's like she never existed at all.

x

they win their battles because of course they do.

you never really know why you fight until you have a reason to.

_Allison died saving her friends. what would you die for?_

you can't die for a ghost.

x

chris leaves a mess in his wake. he gives isaac the keys to the apartment, hugs him gruffly, and smiles sadly at the ground. they aren't good with words and they never share unless they're both drunk and crying or fighting. he's more of a father to isaac than his own ever was, but fathers leave when their children are grown. isaac supposes he might be broken and beaten, but he's grown, so Chris leaves and the world doesn't collapse.

the key to allison's room has a fleur de lis on it, etched into the silver and it fits in the door. the room is untouched. window by the bed still cracked, faded sunlit photos of her and Lydia grinning wide stuck in the edges of the mirror frame, a dead bunch of peonies in the vase that he gave her by the bedside table, ticket stubs and pictures and cards from scott in the floorboards beneath her doorjamb, the bestiary sandwiched between jane austen and jd salinger. her silver arrowheads scattered on the bedspread.

isaac lays on the floor and stares at the ceiling. it smells like tangerines and lilacs and jasmine, suffocatingly so. he laughs and laughs and laughs until he cries himself to sleep.

x

he packs his bag and he leaves town but not before copying the key four times and leaving the envelope and two dozen scarlet peonies on lydia's doorstep in the dead of night.

_si je vous aimais tous moins je pourrais être capable de parler. il doit être l'amour sinon il serait trop douloureux pour être autre chose. leur dire, je suis désolé. et que je vais guérir mais _

_s'il vous plaît me souviens que romeo ne s'est jamais remis de Juliette._

he knows his French is rusty at best, but he knows also knows that Lydia knows everything anyway, and the words will come to her without having to even try.

x

the next day he arrives in new Orleans and it smells like magnolias and sun and brine. the first thing he sees out of the bustling airport is a fleur de lis carved into the side of a telephone pole.

he still swears to Christ he hears her laughing in the streets.


End file.
